The BlackBasta Ransomware Gang's Attack on AGCO Corp

The BlackBasta ransomware gang has attacked AGCO Corp. AGCO announced on May 5th, 2022, that it was the target of a ransomware attack that impacted some of its production facilities. AGCO initially said it "anticipated its business operations will be adversely affected for several days and potentially longer to fully resume all services depending upon how quickly the company is able to repair its systems." However, AGCO released a statement on May 16th reporting that most affected production sites and operations had resumed activities within a week. The BlackBasta ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the attack, posting a sample of the exfiltrated data on its data leak site. AGCO, however, has not commented on whether BlackBasta was behind the attack.

Black Basta: A New Threat in the Cybersecurity Landscape

Black Basta is a more recent RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) player that first emerged in early 2022 and is assessed by some researchers to be a revival of the Conti and REvil attack groups. Considering they had just emerged in the spring of 2022, BlackBasta quickly became one of the most prolific attack groups, with more than 100 known victims. Black Basta continues to evolve their RaaS platform, with ransomware payloads that can infect systems running both Windows and Linux systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in VMware ESXi running on enterprise servers and uses both ChaCha20 and RSA-4096 for rapid encryption of the targeted network and, in some cases leverages malware strains like Qakbot and exploits like PrintNightmare during the infection process.